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I was sweating, breathless, weary: it takes stamina to eat the food of champions

If you want to be a world-beating athlete you must eat McDonald’s

August 2 2012, 1:01am, The Times

Fans eat lunch at McDonald'sTimes photographer, Paul Rogers

By 1.15pm I was running a muck sweat, struggling for breath, and really, really needed to lie down. I couldn’t have felt or looked worse if I’d just had a poor-to-middling round under Zara Phillips. But this is the Olympics. No place for quitters. And I had made a vow to myself: to visit as many of the 7,000 McDonald’s outlets at the Olympic Park as I could, and to eat every single thing on the menu at all of them, in a single day.

Why? Because McDonald’s is easily the most visible Olympic sponsor, of course. It is the keeper of the Olympic arches. And they have built the biggest McDonald’s in the world right next to the main Olympic stadium, because obviously if…